The faun phalanx in the center was bleeding heavily. On the wings, the centaurs had stopped bothering with formation entirely. They leveled their spears and charged like knights, one reckless counter-charge after another.
The charges were brave. They were splendid. They were stones thrown into a lake—barely a ripple, and then the enemy's blades swallowed them.
Bella wanted the centaurs back in line. But these centaurs would rather die mid-charge than stand like infantry and let the enemy slaughter them where they stood.
"Pull your people back!"
"Fuck, can none of you understand plain speech?!"
Bella was shouting herself hoarse, and the centaurs kept launching their glorious, doomed charges.
"Not yet? Is it still not time?" the faun general demanded, grabbing Bella's arm.
Bella was every bit as frantic. The force was small, sure, but she'd never commanded an ancient battle line before. All the theory in the world didn't prepare her for the actual fight—the problems were everywhere. Watching centaur after centaur go down under enemy blades, she felt the guilt like a weight on her chest. If she'd known it would be like this, she'd have charged straight at them and gotten it over with. Instead, her soldiers were going forward one by one to die, and she kept feeling every one of those deaths as her own fault.
But she knew better than to break. If she lost her nerve, the battle was already over.
She drew several deep breaths, swept the field with her Hawkeye Vision, and said evenly to the faun general, "Tell your people. Hold for another quarter-hour."
A quarter-hour was a fantasy. She had no choice—she had to commit the gryphons.
The gryphons hurled boulders down on the enemy, snatched them up, and flung them skyward. The coalition's line just barely held.
From her chariot, the White Witch laughed long and loud. She committed her own air force—a larger flight of harpies and three cyclopes.
One gryphon could handle ten harpies. Cyclopes were a different problem.
Those giants hated flying creatures with a passion. They hurled boulders with pinpoint accuracy. Every time a cyclops's arm came down, a gryphon dropped from the sky.
"Pull back! Get your people back!" Bella barked the order, and even though she got it out in time, half the committed gryphons were dead by the time the rest disengaged.
Slaughter. Feathers, broken stone, flesh—scattered across the earth. Every time a wing-wounded gryphon hit the ground, the orcs and half-orcs swarmed over it.
Five gryphons died. Their bodies were hacked apart. When their heads were set out in a neat row at the White Witch's feet, the coalition had lost the sky entirely.
Bella had plenty of reserves, but the whole line was about to collapse and she couldn't think of a good play. She was gritting her teeth, on the verge of calling a retreat, when thirteen dwarves appeared on the flank.
"Woman—we're here to help!" they roared in unison.
They were in full plate, every one of them armed to the teeth. Their leader, a dwarf wielding a heavy wooden cudgel, was the fiercest of them. He sheared through a cyclops's knee in one stroke, sprang up, and hammered the cudgel down on the giant's single eye.
Once. Twice. Again. The eyeball, the size of a basketball, ruptured into pulp. Green fluid sluiced out across the ground. Then he drew his blade and sawed the cyclops's throat clean.
His companions took down the other two cyclopes in a coordinated press.
The dwarves filled the coalition's missing heavy-hitter role. Dwarves, it turned out, had a particular fondness for fighting giants—cyclopes, half-blood Frost Giants, ordinary giants, they all went down under the dwarven war-axes and war-hammers.
On the back of their fury, and Bella's constant redirecting of the line, the coalition steadied from the brink of collapse.
"This isn't going to work! You can't win this fight!" The dwarf leader, drenched in blood, turned and bellowed at Bella with full authority.
His tone had nothing polite about it, but Bella wasn't one to stand on ceremony. She was just grateful for the help—if this battle had been lost because of her misjudgment, she'd have been eaten alive by guilt.
She'd made a fatal mistake: overthinking. She'd been holding so many cards in reserve that the line nearly broke before any of them came down. Thank god the dwarves had shown up when they did.
"I know. I know. This one's on me. But I've got this battle half-won already. I owe you one—I need your people to cover our retreat."
It was an outrageous thing to ask. These people had come to help her fight, and she was asking them to play rearguard? Where was her conscience?
The dwarf leader stared her in the eye for a solid half-minute before he nodded. "Right. My people and I will cover your retreat."
"Fall back! Fall back! Move, move!" Bella snapped the orders out fast. The coalition bolted east, toward the estuary at the end of the valley.
Thirteen dwarven warriors stood their ground under wave after wave of minotaurs, orcs, and boar-men, buying the army time with nothing but their personal prowess.
"How dull. I thought she'd at least be a decent opponent. Still too young, it seems." The White Witch hadn't so much as lifted a finger from start to finish. The minotaur general falling into the pit, harpies against gryphons—none of it had moved her. She watched quietly from the rear.
Servants were servants. Masters didn't fight for their servants.
Bella had suffered a crushing defeat, and that defeat seemed to confirm everything the White Witch had predicted. The coalition couldn't hold.
Bella kept trying to rally the centaurs for stands along the way, but in her own assessment, it was only prolonging the end.
The coalition looked like it had panicked completely—a mob of soldiers streaming toward the estuary. This pleased the White Witch even more. The estuary opened out into broad ground—good for fleeing, yes, but even better for her magic to unfold properly.
Chase. Kill. No survivors.
The coalition funneled through a ravine between snowy mountains. By now the line was a rabble. Except for the dwarves and a handful of stronger centaurs, there was no cohesive resistance left.
The Minotaur General seemed not to know the word fatigue. He was still up front, driving the pursuit.
The coalition passed through the ravine. The evil army poured in after them. Even the White Witch rode her chariot through the gap as if she were out on a picnic.
Behind them, from every direction, a new force began to gather.
Genichiro Ashina stood at full attention. The Wolf, the clan's top shinobi and now one of the Nightjar Ninja, was making his report.
"My lord, the enemy has cleared the ravine. They haven't detected us."
Genichiro still followed Sengoku custom—ornate armor, a war fan in his hand, a massive two-meter bow (about six and a half feet) across his back.
His samurai retainers fanned out to either side of him.